On the education front things are moving forward nicely. I now have confirmation that the only thing that stands between me and a degree in computer sciene is finishing my thesis paper. The paper itself is already well under way. I have all the literature research done and I have written the first 2 chapters and I am fairly far with the third chapter. I just send out a ton of email interviews. The general topic is open source in the relational database market. I will publish the paper on this site once I am done.

I am also now officially MySQL 5.0 developer certified. I did the beta exams back in march/april and I passed. Overall the exam felt much more close to real world knowledge than the Zend PHP exam I took last year. I learned a lot of the nitty gritty details of MySQL I have not run into so far. Unfortunately even MySQL 5.0 still has a fair amount of stuff like this. That being said the …

For small ISVs, Google is GOD. A significant percentage of the traffic into our web-store comes through Google. However, too much of Googlism is not always good. Read on?

I run a small ISV, Webyog, which develops and sells MySQL management tools. Most of our sales take place through our online store. I am a strong believer of  Sales Fixes Everything and just like other owners of small ISVs, the most important and ?feel-good? mails for us are those ?sales notification? mails that we get whenever someone makes a purchase.

I live in India and the bulk of our sales take place in USA and West Europe. This means that I am generally sleeping while the majority of our sales are taking place. The first thing that I do in the morning is to download and count the sales notification mails. Sometimes …

Edwin DeSouza had been nagging me about various web pages on the subject of online backup; one, on the Microsoft Developer Network, claims that it's bad to optimize your backup strategy for backup speed.

That's an interesting issue, and one that we thought about early on. We decided that, in general, it is good to optimize your backup strategy for speed. One size doesn't fit all, of course, but:

• The basic issue is that a fast backup can bring a slow recovery in its wake. That's often the case, but not always.
• The impact of a slow recovery depends on how often you do it. Our attitude is that a recovery is a very rare occurrence. The fact that we've got by without an online backup at all for so long reinforces this viewpoint.
• Backups …

I’ve written a lot recently about MySQL index and table structure, primary keys, surrogate keys, and related optimizations. In this article I’ll explain how MySQL’s index structures enable an extremely important query optimization, and how that differs between storage engines. I’ll also show you how to know and predict when the optimization is triggered, how to design tables and queries so it’ll be used, and how to avoid defeating it with poor practices.

I have finally decided to start using an RSS reader. Recent changes in the MySQL forums' behavior, layout and features have made it hard for me to see what forums have new posts have been made— so I will give the reader a try for a while and see if I like it better. I have subscribed to most of the forums, not that I am knowledgeable in all areas, but I find it interesting to read posts on subjects outside of my direct bailiwick.

So far so good, though I notice the feeds for a couple of MySQL forums aren't working, Database Adminstration and .Net. None of the foreign language feeds are working either, but I expect that is because they are brand new and haven't been posted in yet. I like the format of my chosen RSS client, similar to that of an email program for example the one I am using to peruse the news groups. Ultimately it would be nice to have one client that …

If you're doing significant amount of writes to Innodb tables decent size of innodb_log_file_size is important for MySQL Performance. However setting it too large will increase recovery time, so in case of MySQL crash or power failure it may take long time before MySQL Server is operational again.

So how to find the optimal combination ?

First let me explain what happens on recovery and why large innodb_log_file_size slows down recovery. During startup after crash Innodb scans log files to find log records which only have been applied in memory and do not exist in tablespace. Log records for modifications which did not make it to the tablespace are then applied. This is called redo phase of recovery. It can take pretty long time and this time depends on number of variables - how large are rows ? (smaller log records mean more records for same sized logs), how random were data modifications …

You think I'm kidding? No way!

There is this web page (I blogged about it a few months ago) where you get an interface to BitKeeper to watch the development activities: http://mysql.bkbits.net:8080/mysql-5.1/index.html.

Just for fun I replaced 5.1 with 5.2 and - it worked. So I followed the instructions from the manual and only replaced 5.1 with 5.2 again. This way, I ended up with a MySQL 5.2.0-alpha installation:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 3 to server version: 5.2.0-alpha

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql>

I doubt that there are many (if any at all) differences to the current 5.1 development …

I'd like to chime in with Brian and remind you that the Hamburg MySQL User Group meets tonight, too! I have invited Jan Kneschke to give a talk about "Deadly sins in MySQL" (courtesy of Arjen Lentz) and I will also talk a bit about what's cooking at MySQL since the last time we met (it's been three months!). Looking forward to meeting you tonight - we will again meet at 19:00 in the Chinese restaurant Ni-Hao in Hamburg, Wandsbek.

Last week I was notified that my article about how to install and configure MySQL and the MySQL Connector/J was published in the Java Starter Magazine, a special edition of the german Java Magazin. It covers the basic installation of MySQL and Connector/J on Windows and Linux and how to write a small example program to connect to to MySQL with Java using the Eclipse framework. They were kind enough to send me a number of copies that I plan to give away at tonight's Hamburg MySQL User Group Meeting.

For those that are using a Referential Integrity based Storage Engine in MySQL, the use of Foreign Keys can provide an extra level of data integrity within your application. There are of course caveats to this statement, such as correct design, proper transactional use etc, but that’s a topic for another time. The use of CASCADE has an effect on this.

So, just a quick refresher, using the MySQL Sakila Sample Database (if you don’t have it, get it. This can be a valuable tool in many other areas). Let’s first check out the Schema Diagram. We will …